Ballard’s 24-Hour Corner is no more. The corner where you could once
buy a Bloody Mary to go with your pancakes, get a burger topped with
beet relish, and bowl a round at four, five, or six in the morning, is
about to change, and probably not for the better. News broke on January
4 that the 51-year-old Sunset Bowl in Ballard would close in mid-April,
making way for a large apartment development on the corner of 15th
Avenue Northwest and Northwest Market Street. Meanwhile, across Market
Street, the building that for 20 years housed Manning’s Cafeteria, and
for 20 after that, a Denny’s franchise, is shuttered and awaiting
likely demolition. Going up in its place: an eight-story building with
261 condos and ground-level retail—a far cry from the businesses
that made the corner a destination for generations of Ballard
residents.
The Sunset site was bought by apartment developer Avalon Communities
for $13.2 million. Although Avalon didn’t return a call requesting
information about its plans in Ballard, the company’s website shows a
portfolio of large, cookie-cutter luxury apartment buildings, including
several in Redmond and two in Bellevue. Listed rental rates start at
around $1,200—for a studio. Sunset owner John Leary did not
return calls for comment; the Sunset’s general manager, Verl Lowry,
said only that everyone at the Sunset was “stressed,” including Leary.
“He just doesn’t want to be bothered right now.”
“I think one of the hardest things is that both [the Denny’s and the
Sunset] represented Ballard’s old, blue-collar days,” says Beth Miller,
director of the Ballard Chamber of Commerce and a lifelong Ballard
resident. “It’s gotten to the point where money from outside the
community is driving a lot of the [development] decisions.” Miller says
community members agreed to accept more density in exchange for more
jobs; but as density in Ballard has increased, she says, the number of
jobs in the area has scarcely budged. “These condos often have trouble
filling their retail spaces because they often don’t attract pedestrian
traffic,” Miller says.
The corner of 15th and Market has never been particularly
pedestrian-oriented—the wide expanse of pavement and car-oriented
businesses take care of that—but the new developments will bring
hundreds of new cars into a neighborhood whose street system is already
overtaxed. If Rite Aid gets permission to put in a drive-through
prescription window in a new development up the street, Ballard
residents could face a traffic nightmare.
Miller also worries that the large new developments will make that
part of Ballard look “like anything else anywhere in the city. “Part of
what everybody is feeling is that Ballard is just being wiped out. I’m
not averse to change per se, but we don’t want to be the new
Belltown.”
The old Denny’s building certainly couldn’t be mistaken for anything
in Belltown. Built in a space-age style known as Googie, it’s
flamboyant, bright, eye-catching, and arguably ugly. Earlier this
month, the owners of the building hired architect Larry Johnson to
prepare a landmark nomination on their behalf. The move is a standard
feint by developers who don’t want their building to win landmark
status—file an application that argues, in effect, against making
the building a landmark in the hope that the Landmark Preservation
Board will agree that the building is not historic. Johnson’s
nomination argued that not enough of the building’s characteristic
Googie elements remained to make it worth landmarking; however, the
city’s Landmark Preservation Board has voted to move forward with the
nomination.
Alan Michelsen is an architect who filed a counter-report to the one
Johnson submitted to the board. He believes Johnson’s application was
biased and incomplete, and failed to consider the significance of
Googie architecture and the architect who designed the building,
Clarence Mayhew. The building was originally a franchise of the
Manning’s restaurant chain, and didn’t become a Denny’s until 1984,
when neighborhood protests convinced the new owners not to tear the
building down.
But since then, Michelsen says, the environment has become more
hostile for preservationists like himself. “I think [preservationism]
has been relatively dormant over the last 20 years. If you look around
Ballard, you cannot tell me developers have been impeded by
preservationists. That’s just obviously wrong.” Michelsen says he just
wants the developer to integrate the Denny’s building into whatever
they put on the corner—a suggestion that strikes some, including
Miller, as not much better than demolition. “I’m torn between thinking
it would be great to keep it and thinking it would make for a really
awkward-looking development.”
The closure of the Sunset brings the total number of bowling alleys
in Seattle and the immediate vicinity down to five; the Sunset’s owner sold Leilani
Lanes in North Seattle to a developer for $6.2 million in 2005.
